The present invention relates in general to the field of computers and similar technologies, and in particular to software utilized in this field. Still more particularly, the present invention presents a method and system for displaying text content from an HTML document at a computer that lacks a browser.
Software products often provide on-line documentation and support to customers in HyperText Markup Language (HTML), so that items such as instruction manuals, installation instructions, help pages, etc. can be displayed using any common Web browser (e.g., Internet Explorer, Netscape, etc.). However, because of security issues, many, if not most, network managers deliberately do NOT install browsers on enterprise servers, since most viruses, hackers, and other mischief makers attack through browsers. Thus, while the absence of a browser improves system security, this prevents a user from reading needed support literature. Furthermore, there may be missing software or hardware prerequisites that prevent installation of a software product, and thus the product's ability to display the HTML text is likewise prevented.
Furthermore, there is the problem of encoding a text file into a user's displayable character map. That is, most “read me” files (that provide basic or advanced instructions for installing software and/or using a particular software feature) are often in plain text. As such, the text in the “read me” file will only be correctly displayed if the text is encoded using the correct character map of the receiving user's console. For example, assume that a text “read me” file is in Chinese using the character set for Big5, but the receiving user can only display Chinese characters using the UTF-8 character set. Using current technology, this “read me” file can be transencoded from Big5 to UTF-8 by transencoding software. However, since there is no way for the sender to know what character map every receiver will have, such transencoding is not feasible by the sender.